Outrageous Fortune: Growing Up at Leeds Castle Read online

  I watched this whole affair in a state of extreme shock. I do not know how many whacks James received, but when it was all over he, too, was crying. When my father departed, he did so abruptly, without a word to anyone, leaving the four of us to try and recover as best we could from the unpleasantness of it all.

  James went off to school in a sorry state, Anne cleared away breakfast and tidied up, and Nanny and I returned to our morning schedule of bathroom matters, a little music on the radio, and preparations to go out. She did not discuss with me the previous half hour, so I assumed she preferred not to. I, therefore, was obliged to file the matter away in a new and unfamiliar category, one that for quite some time I referenced merely as “Bad.”

  This was the first occasion from which I could start to form an opinion about my father, and what an occasion it was! From a selfish standpoint I was peeved that he had failed even to acknowledge my presence. Undoubtedly he was concentrating on the task at hand, not a task he would have wished for and one he clearly would have wanted over and done with quickly. But all the same, I would have appreciated something from him, had needed something from him, right there and then, after sitting through such a nasty and really quite disturbing business. Sadly, frustratingly, I got nothing, not even a pat on the head; so I was left, feeling isolated, to ponder what I had just seen. I sought comfort by retreating into my shell during the whole affair, unaware as to what it all meant for the future and me. I never saw my father in the nursery again.

  2.

  THE CASTLE WAY

  It was a bothersome affliction being a shy child because you always appeared to be taking two steps backward before the first, hesitant step forward. So whatever it was people might have been expecting of you, they tended to give up and move on (often with a quizzical expression and a raised eyebrow) long before you had worked up enough steam to say or do what you had originally intended. With people other than Nanny and my mother and brothers, it was frequently a struggle to present myself in a pleasing light, and on the occasions when I did succeed it was usually because I forced myself to.

  I could be surrounded by a large number of people and still feel completely alone. Birthday parties were generally excruciating, including my own. I’d be sitting at the tea table or on my parents’ drawing-room floor watching Popeye cartoons on a noisy home projector, mini revellers all around me howling like banshees, feeling as if I were on a desert island—in fact, wishing I were.

  If I’d had my wits about me (which I tended not to because, after 1956, my wits became inexhaustibly tied up learning Lonnie Donegan, Cliff Richard, and later, Roy Orbison tunes on the nursery radio and David’s record player) and had actually given some thought to my lacklustre social calendar, it might have dawned on me that the London/Leeds Castle bubble, inside which Nanny and I lived, acted as a powerful barrier against outsiders. Furthermore, it helped promote feelings of isolation that came and went during my childhood and that have never entirely gone away, despite my now being as happy as any man could legitimately wish to be.

  At Leeds Castle the nursery was much larger than the one in London, but we conducted our lives there (or had them conducted) in much the same fashion, as an adjunct to those of the grown-ups. We were independent inasmuch as we were left to our own devices (with Nanny acting as supervisor in chief), but controlled by a framework of rules that included a flexible timetable as well as being seen no more than necessary, and heard somewhat less. There was a degree of stealth in how we comported ourselves, especially before noon; and a general understanding that our needs and wishes must always be governed—and duly accorded priority—by what I now call “the castle way.”

  The castle way was the all-encompassing, all-powerful, semi-feudal-system-meets-benevolent-dictatorship by which Granny B ran the lives of all those who fell within her sphere of influence and control. That sphere included a select group of friends and advisers, my parents, my brothers, Nanny, me, assorted aunts and uncles, and, in some ways, the very air we breathed.

  The castle way—or Granny B’s way, generous to a fault but inclined towards imperiousness—permeated every aspect of our lives. Up to a point it governed what we should all be doing and when we should all be doing it, at any given time throughout the year. There may have been other upper-class matriarchal figures in postwar Britain lording it over their subjects in just such a fashion, but I was not aware of them and certainly never came remotely within their jurisdiction.

  The structure of my existence revolved around the activities of my parents, and theirs, in turn, revolved around the weekly calendar of Granny B and “the court.” The court was made up of close friends and immediate family who found it amusing to refer to themselves as though they were royal courtiers, most of them drawn from the higher ranks of society. If Granny B was amused by the unsubtle, gently mocking comparison of her domestic arrangements to the households of Queen Elizabeth and other monarchs, she hid it well. And I never saw anyone speak of “the court” to her face. Even my mother would only use the term with a wry smile attached.

  Granny B and the court began each New Year with a three-month sojourn in the Bahamas; spent April, May, June, and part of July commuting between London and weekends at Leeds; shifted to the South of France for the summer and returned to the London/Leeds format for the autumn months and Christmas. Nothing about this programme—or, at least, the bits that affected me—struck me as anything other than normal at the time. It was what I knew. I spent my life with Nanny. I saw my mother and brothers every now and then, and periodically I had lively encounters with estate workers and Harrods doormen when out and about in the pram or going for a walk. By the time I was five I had still not been exposed to any useful indications—from inside or outside the London/Leeds Castle bubble—that my childhood was unusual. When I started making friends at Hill House, it came as a surprise to find that not everybody lived like me. In this instance the castle way never became my friend, let alone an ideal travelling companion, thanks to its preoccupation with keeping the real world at a pronounced arm’s length from my own.

  * * *

  The castle way’s feudal system—structured, top-down authority—was straightforward, and castle life was big, regulated, and formal. Granny B, as chatelaine and keeper of the purse strings, was the undisputed leader and ruler of the roost. She was ideally suited to this position thanks to her wealth and her personality, which bypassed gregariousness in favour of quiet authority and seductive style. Her manner was rigorously polite, her gaze unfaltering, her smile infrequent, her charm carefully rationed.

  As in feudal times, she rested atop a layered hierarchy that included members of the court, her friends outside the court who came to the castle less frequently, and the family, which of course were the unpaid groups. Financial advisers, antique furniture and decorating consultants, personal staff, and estate workers comprised the paid groups. In the eleventh century the Normans, having bloodily subjugated Saxon England from top to bottom, established their layered hierarchy, which started with the king who ruled over the barons who ruled over the knights who ruled over the villeins who, despite being lowly workers with no landholding rights, were at least able to look down their noses at the serfs who dwelled at the bottom of the ladder of power with little chance of escaping their allotment in life. With a few perfunctory nods to the twentieth century, Granny B ran affairs at Leeds Castle along remarkably similar lines.

  David Margesson was the court’s undeclared ringmaster and Granny B’s closest friend, adviser, and confidant. He rested in solitary splendour just beneath her in the Leeds Castle hierarchy—an unchallenged, viceregal position—and he helped her run the Leeds Castle estate with an astonishing lightness and deftness of touch. In feudal terms he was the most powerful baron.

  David, or “Morg,” as our family liked to call him, was a man of unparalleled wit, charm, erudition, and all-around impressiveness. Tall and always immaculately dressed, he had a face that seemed sculptured for posterity, and a speaki
ng voice to match. As a teenager I did suspect, although it was never confirmed to me, that in his capacity as my grandmother’s longest-standing male friend, his role, both in London and at Leeds, could well have extended to one of an intimate, nocturnal nature. Granted their remarkable closeness, it would have been surprising had this not been the case.

  Morg had won a Military Cross in World War I. He was elected to the House of Commons as a Conservative member of Parliament in 1922 and was government chief whip from 1931 until 1940. From 1940 to 1942 he was secretary of state for war under Winston Churchill. Created Viscount (Lord) Margesson of Rugby in 1942, he served in the House of Lords for twenty more years. As did the rest of the court, he went about his business in London during the week and came down to Leeds every weekend.

  One of Morg’s many gifts was making people feel special, no matter who they were or what their age, something I was happy to learn over a simple musical matter. It began with the first song I fell in love with on the radio, “The Happy Wanderer,” by the Obernkirchen Children’s Choir. Derek McCulloch, a famous BBC radio presenter better known as Uncle Mac, would play it often on his Saturday-morning Children’s Favourites programme. Though the original 1953 hit was sung in German, by 1956 I’d heard it often enough in English, by other singers, to start learning it. Soon nobody in Egerton Terrace was safe from my persistent warbling, and I began to wonder if perhaps I might not brave the lion’s den and attempt a “court” performance. The awkward question was, For whom? Although I was only five and had little experience of the grown-ups down at Leeds, my instincts told me that Morg was the one I would be most comfortable singing to. I asked my mother, who by that time was used to enduring my warbles in London—“How lovely, darling”—to arrange a show.

  My performance was set for one morning, before lunch, outside the castle front doors. I presented myself at (high) noon, without Nanny, and waited for Morg. Soon he and my mother arrived, and after making themselves comfortable on the cushioned wicker chairs, with accompanying mutterings and mumbled asides, Morg looked up at me, as I remained standing, and smiled broadly. “My dear fella,” he said, “what an honour you do me! A singer, I do declare. How about that!”

  “Fire away, darling, if you’re ready,” my mother prompted, keenly aware that delay might bring on an unwanted dose of the collywobbles. I’d had the collywobbles since before leaving the nursery, but I knew this was a chance to shine—a rare opportunity, and one I had instigated myself. And besides, it was too late to call the whole thing off, so I started to sing: “I love to go a-wandering / Along the mountain track…” I completed four verses and two choruses, encouraged all the way by my audience’s rapt attention—Morg even conducted with his right hand, index finger forward—and then stopped me before I forgot the words. “Oh my dear fella, marvellous, absolutely first-rate!” he thundered as he stood up and magically produced a half crown from behind my ear as a token of his appreciation. I was ecstatic and glowed with satisfaction. What a revelation to be paid to sing! But more than that, the fact that Morg had taken the time to listen, putting me at ease and entering into the spirit of the occasion, made me think that here was the man I wanted to be like when I grew up.

  Next in the hierarchy, the number-two baron in feudal terms, came Geoffrey Lloyd. He was also tall and quite handsome, and though no one was able, or perhaps willing, to explain it, his nickname was Woody. Woody was less gregarious than Morg and had a slightly diffident manner but he, too, was a portrait of affability (with his peers) and possessed deep, wide-ranging knowledge. Throughout his life he remained a bachelor, and by the time I was twelve or thirteen I thought he probably was a “confirmed bachelor”—the always-affectionate euphemism for homosexuality my mother would use from time to time.

  In the 1930s, when Leeds Castle became England’s epicentre for spectacular weekend parties featuring royalty, aristocrats, leading politicians, newspaper barons, socialites, ambassadors, and Hollywood movie stars all eager to accept invitations, Woody and Morg were regarded as being foremost amongst Granny B’s “admirers”—as lovers were delightfully called in those heady prewar days. Naturally that left her husband, the genial Adrian Baillie, with rather more on his plate to contend with than he might have liked, so it was perhaps fortunate that he had his political constituents in Scotland to occupy his time while “the Leeds set” got on with their high jinks, bedroom manouvres, drinking, gambling, and Cole Porter—the height of daring—on the gramophone. Mr. Porter came to the castle as well.

  Both Morg and Woody were first introduced to Leeds Castle by Adrian Baillie, who was a fellow member of Parliament. Never could he have anticipated the inadvertent consequences of his action. He and Granny B were divorced in 1944, and he died of pneumonia in 1947.

  Woody was elected Conservative MP for a Birmingham district in 1931. He was Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s parliamentary private secretary. He had secret and specialized jobs during World War II, overseeing plans for setting the Channel on fire should the Nazis attempt an invasion. After the war he became governor of the BBC, minister of fuel and power, and minister of education. In 1974, the year Granny B died, he was created Baron Geoffrey-Lloyd of Broomfield, a village just up the road from Leeds Castle. As with Morg, Woody had his own quarters in the castle, and he, too, was a guest almost every weekend.

  Woody had no time for children and made a point of ignoring them as much as decency permitted. On the rare occasions that David, James, and I joined him and Uncle Gawaine (Granny B and Adrian Baillie’s son) for the morning nine holes of golf, we boys and the two older men hardly spoke to one another. I used to find that annoying, but my brothers assured me it was quite normal, so I gently fumed and got on with the game. Fortunately the course professional, Johnson, a Scot with an impenetrable accent and a golf swing from Mars, coached us and kept us focused while Woody and Gawaine sorted out the problems of the world during their round.

  Granny B had given the go-ahead to build the golf course in 1931 not because she enjoyed playing—she would hardly have recognized one end of a golf club from the other—but because she felt that a vast expanse of beautifully laid-out trees and mowed grass, leading to an expansive sheet of water, with the castle as the focal point in the middle, would create as idyllic a country scene as could humanly be devised. She stipulated that no bunkers should be visible from the castle and that the skyline should not be interrupted by a flagpole on a green. The end result was a nine-hole course considered by many to be one of Britain’s finest. Famous golfers such as Walter Hagen and Gene Sarazen came to play, and in the 1930s the American Ryder Cup team would make it their first port of call.

  Woody’s golf game was a catastrophe, and his swing was a mélange of uncoordinated movements more related to a jitterbug than to any known sporting endeavour. When standing over the ball preparing to strike, he made strange vocal noises, in two-note combinations, without regard for the musical sensibilities of his listeners. He wiggled his hips and banged the club on the ground several times. Often he’d look up at those standing about and guffaw before once more returning to the wiggle-and-bang routine. Finally he’d raise the club towards the sky and bring it down in a chopping motion, as though he were trying to slice off the back third of the tiny white ball instead of propelling it way into the distance in as straight a line as possible. Usually the ball skidded along the grass forty or fifty yards, and Woody would exclaim an emphatic “Bugger!” before handing his club to Johnson and resuming his singular hum.

  Gawaine, on the other hand, a natural sportsman, swung his golf club like a man possessed. His driver had a head the size of a bulldozer, and his stance was so wide and aggressive it looked as though he were preparing to lay an egg rather than strike a golf ball. His preparation was short—a brief wiggle, and then he unleashed an immaculate, almighty, 180-degree swing that displayed the furies of hell and the power of a drag racer. The ball would soar on a trajectory to the heavens and, after its seemingly endless gravity-defying flight, plop
back down to earth within easy chipping distance of the green. After a particularly good effort Gawaine liked to permit himself a self-congratulatory smile, which he would generously share with his audience.

  * * *

  My parents and other close family members, junior barons in feudal terms, came just below Woody in the castle hierarchy, followed by personal secretaries, Borrett (the butler), Cooper (the head carpenter and master builder), Mr. Money (the estate manager), lawyers, and an assortment of business advisers, all senior knights. The grandchildren might best be described as junior knights with promotion potential, while certain estate workers—Howard, the head gardener, Peter Taylor, the birdman—enjoyed permanent junior knight status.

  Occupiers of the lowest ranks in the hierarchy, once downtrodden serfs and villeins, were now respected and admired workers, such as Dan and Charlie his cart horse, and Mr. Elves, the gruff, red-bearded electrician. Dan bore a striking resemblance to Popeye the Sailor Man, without the pipe. He could be spotted all over the estate loading his cart with unwanted rubbish and hauling it off to the furnace, which was tucked away in a far corner of the park, out of sight of the kitchen gardens and Mr. Elves’s cottage. Charlie was gigantic, always moved in slow motion, and neither he nor Dan spoke more than strictly necessary.

  * * *

  A more formidable or magnificent butler than Borrett would be hard to imagine. From the top of his balding round head to the tip of his highly polished black lace-up shoes he personified all that a butler should be: intelligent, efficient, unflappable, and discreet. He had the complete trust of his employer and the absolute confidence of his staff. He was well liked, greatly respected, and he unhesitatingly returned the compliment to one and all. His manner was the same with me as it was with royalty; he called me “Master Anthony” until I was thirteen and “Mister Anthony” after that, a promotion that came as a blessed relief as it finally placed me on equal ground with my elder brothers.